This blog is about thinking of things past, present and future in testing. As much as I'd like to see clearly, my crystal ball is quite dim. Learning is essential and this is my tool for that.
A sister blog in Finnish: http://testauskirja.blogspot.com

Monday, January 22, 2018

Learning Programming Test-Driven

I've been delivering a test automation course, in a mob format. I get the whole group together, to work on test automation activities. We first get an experience that we share, and then we talk about what we learned and need to know about automation.

We've typically spent a couple of sessions on Selenium web driver, first just creating a test that runs, but soon after refactoring the tests so that we'd have more of a page object pattern in use. We spend a session on ApprovalTests, just to figure out what could be tested if we approached testing with creating and comparing to a "golden master". We test an API in a "fill in the blanks" kind of style. And finally, we spend a session starting a program blank, seeing where Test-Driven Development takes us.

The Test-Driven activity has turned out to be my favorite. I love how the tests grow with the application. I love how small steps end up taking us to a coverage we wouldn't create later on if we tested after. But what I love the most is the way the group - usually full of people who don't identify as programmers, some people who have never written code in their life - reacts to it.

We usually do very simple problems like FizzBuzz. Getting the 1st test out of the group asking for a single example is often the hardest part. Turning the example to code some syntax needs to be revealed, but none of the cruft around classes, just a single test. And when most of the programming in the IDE is learning to use the automatic generation of methods, people come out with a very different feel to programming than if they had to know how to write all the magic words around it.

We've done this in Python. We've done it in C# while I still had Visual Studio. We most often do it in Java. And there is little difference in these two when the full editor support is available.

The reactions of the learners I've worked with make me want to experiment with this more. What if we could teach programming so that we did not go through the usual moves of naming concepts, but we could teach test first and experience first. Naming what you did can come later. Even much later, when you've seen several examples of how some things are done or used.